Which manager left the team in the worst state?

Which manager left the team in a worse state?


  • Total voters
    729
  • Poll closed .
I would say Solskjaer is the worst, followed by Van Gaal.

Solskjaer's signings, still in the team, consist of: two old strikers with no value. A midfielder who never played. An average left back, a rubbish right back, and an average centre back. It is not pretty reading.

Most of the signings you wouldn't get anywhere near the money we paid for them if we chose to sell.

Martial, Rashford, Shaw, and Pogba etc. are worse than they have ever been.

The only, potential, redeeming factor is if Sancho and Varane can improve under the next manager. But, at the moment, they are not looking too great, either. And Varane is known to be prone to injuries, so this could end up a disaster as he has already been injured a lot for us.

Fernandes has deteriorated to a point of uselessness, also.
 
Voting in this thread reeks with recency bias. Quite literally, since the vote stands like Ole > Mou > LVG > Moyes. A more rational explananation is each successive manager post SAF had a bigger challenge to climb and couldn't afford to miss much, which they did unfortunately.
 
Voting in this thread reeks with recency bias. Quite literally, since the vote stands like Ole > Mou > LVG > Moyes. A more rational explananation is each successive manager post SAF had a bigger challenge to climb and couldn't afford to miss much, which they did unfortunately.

I don’t think it’s recency bias when you consider that the squad has never looked more desperately in need of an overhaul. Literally every area of the pitch is severely flawed. Up front, midfield, wide players, defence, goalkeeper, everything. This is the first time we haven’t had a single element of the squad without something to be positive about since Fergie retired.

You can certainly argue Ole inherited a worse squad than any other manager (debatable) but there’s absolutely no doubt he left it in an absolute fecking shambles.
 
Mourinho left us in a pit. Ole didn’t even leave us in that bad a place. Ragnick has proven to be completely out of his depth though. This squad is still better than the one left by LVG and Mourinho
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On paper I’d agree with you and I was one of those that thought that we’d improve a lot under a new manager. I just didn’t realise (which was impossible to do until after Ole had left, IMO) was how coddled this group of players were, on top of being incredibly unfit which we already knew. I mean, they gave Rangnick 30 minutes against Palace but as soon as anything’s gone wrong for a large group of players in this squad they’ve immediately resorted to leaking stuff in the media and shown that they give zero fecks about what happens on the pitch. It’s pretty obvious that the lack of discontent from the same unmotivated group of players under Ole boils down to their egos being stroked and them basically having got their way all the time, to the detriment of their abilities as actual football players.
 
Pointless thread, we are rock bottom at the moment and that's on ole ans his stupid signings.
 
Actually it's LVG. The squad Mourinho inherited was hopeless piece of shit.
 
Maguire > Rojo
Wan Bissaka > Darmian
Sancho > Memphis
Ronaldo > Martiall
Bruno > Di maria
Cavani > aged Rooney

I really don't know wtf people are watching calling Ole's tenure worse than Van Gaals :lol:
 
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It probably is Solskjaer but right now it's hard to see any of these players being salvagable. It might turn out that Ten Hag or whoever comes in and manages to get a few back to previous form who otherwise would have been thought of as write offs. In which case we are overstating the level of decline of the squad right now because everything seems hopeless.
 
I feel like Van Gaal’s philosophy broke a lot of our players mentally at the time.
 
Rubbish excuses?! Thats how it is, not giving my opinion here, i understand that sacking of Ole must be hard for you, life of a drone aint easy without a mothership. Here is how i know you talking shit, if you had any idea of my stances regarding Ole pre and post his sacking, you wouldnt say that i was conned by a hipster, unlike you, dont have follower mentality.
I was all about sacking ole at the end. i disagreed all along with the narrative that this squad was a title winning one. i have been vindicated heavily in that belief since ole left - to the point that most fans on the forum have to come up with crackpot / borderline conspiracy theories about how ole trained the players not to try for the next manager and how sancho is a bad player. im laughing along with it all.
 
Most people realised we were heading one way under Ole’s management, and that our shit on a stick football was eventually going to catch up on us.
Sadly the covid breakout, mid season take over after a horrendous run of results that annihilated any confidence in the team and then the Greenwood incident made this a car crash of a season.
Many of us wanted so desperately to believe that Ole wasn’t just utterly shite at coaching but ok at recruitment and had at least done that well. It sadly looks baaaaad there too, we’ll see next season though really.
ralf inherited a good squad and an extremely easy run of games. the forum 100% agreed with that at the time ralf took over. the main reason we have been poor under ralf is because ralf isn't or hasn't ever been a good manager. he might be a better coach than ole, which is irrelevant since ole didn't coach the team. there are many elements to managing a top team. on average ralf appears to be worse than ole at these.
 
People have just forgotten about LVG and hurt most recently by Ole.
 
The more time each of these managers had the more damage they did. Ole 3 years, Mourinho 2.5, LVG 2 & Moyes 9 months.

Pretty ironic, for a club and fanbase who's mantra and solution to all problems is to just 'give the manager time'
 
This. And he was given more leeway than any other manager, allowed to continue his mollycoddling and sucking up to players, refusing to cash in on players winding their contracts down, acceptance of poor results and performances by a lot of fans who had their ‘99 tinted specs on. Ole has destroyed the club and there will be a big period of rebuild required.
Sad but true. He'll really go down as the worst manager in the club's history. Ole's at the wheel sang at the Kop haunts me to this date.
 
ralf inherited a good squad and an extremely easy run of games. the forum 100% agreed with that at the time ralf took over. the main reason we have been poor under ralf is because ralf isn't or hasn't ever been a good manager. he might be a better coach than ole, which is irrelevant since ole didn't coach the team. there are many elements to managing a top team. on average ralf appears to be worse than ole at these.

I’d love to know how you worked that out. Ralf has been getting worse results but has a worse squad (no Greenwood, no Cavani) and hasn’t had a chance to do one of the most important tasks of any manager, building a decent squad.

We’ve zero evidence that Ole is better than Ralf at any element of being a manager. Just like we currently have zero evidence that Ralf is any good at any element of being a manager.
 
Moyes gutted our institutional memory and caused Rio, Vidic, and Evra to all feck off in his less than one season.

Rio and co behaved like spoiled children. United way, we know best etc... Moyes never stood a chance. In hindsight we should have given him a couple of years.
 
ralf inherited a good squad and an extremely easy run of games. the forum 100% agreed with that at the time ralf took over. the main reason we have been poor under ralf is because ralf isn't or hasn't ever been a good manager. he might be a better coach than ole, which is irrelevant since ole didn't coach the team. there are many elements to managing a top team. on average ralf appears to be worse than ole at these.

Does he though? This is Ole's squad he built over 2.5 years and for almost half a billion pounds. Despite that he still put us in free-fall without winning anything.
 
Mou and it isn't even close.

At the time of sacking of each of these managers, Mou was the only one where we felt, "I'd sell the entire side bar DDG and maybe Rashford". Under Ole, it was "Any decent manager and we'd have won the league". The fact that Rangnick hasn't worked out is not really Ole's fault. The guy achieved 2nd and 3rd with this squad after all
 
Maguire > Rojo
Wan Bissaka > Darmian
Sancho > Memphis
Ronaldo > Martiall
Bruno > Di maria
Cavani > aged Rooney

I really don't know wtf people are watching calling Ole's tenure worse than Van Gaals :lol:

In what world bissaka is better than Damian, a player who has been capped almost 40 times for Italy, is playing regularly in Inter and was good in the 2016-2017 EL campaign?

And the others; Maguire cost 6 times more than Rojo, Martial was actually amazing then, ADM is not worse than Bruno and Cavani is not even playing anymore.
 
Does he though? This is Ole's squad he built over 2.5 years and for almost half a billion pounds. Despite that he still put us in free-fall without winning anything.
over his hundred or so games before this season he was better than ralf has been. everyone agreed he also dramatically improved the squad (until they needed an excuse for ralf this season). the team he inherited had lingard, martial and andreas as important players. now its bruno and sancho in those positions. neither manager has won anything, but we look further with ralf vs oles 2/3 place and litany of semis and finals
 
Ole and I don’t think it’s even close.

His cultural reset was such a load of bs. It’s worse now than it ever has been.
 
over his hundred or so games before this season he was better than ralf has been. everyone agreed he also dramatically improved the squad (until they needed an excuse for ralf this season). the team he inherited had lingard, martial and andreas as important players. now its bruno and sancho in those positions. neither manager has won anything, but we look further with ralf vs oles 2/3 place and litany of semis and finals
You’re really comparing Ole with Ralf who was only an interim?

We have also spent under Ole alot of money on players quite frankly not good enough. Maguire, AWB, Telles, VDB.

We still need to revamp defence, we need to revamp the attacking line too now and we still need to revamp midfield.

We have though massively increased the wage bill whilst regressing one of our top talents in Rashford
 
I’d love to know how you worked that out. Ralf has been getting worse results but has a worse squad (no Greenwood, no Cavani) and hasn’t had a chance to do one of the most important tasks of any manager, building a decent squad.

We’ve zero evidence that Ole is better than Ralf at any element of being a manager. Just like we currently have zero evidence that Ralf is any good at any element of being a manager.

We can however judge Ralf's 22 games vs. Ole's 22 final games with the same squad. Even if we completely ignore that Ole spent 300 million on building his own squad, had multiple seasons, pre-seasons and his own coaching team to coach them, he fares much worse than Ralf for those 22 games.


ManagerGames playedWonLostDraw
Ole Gunnar2279 (10)5
Ralf Ragnick2294 (5)9


So yeah, I don't know if Ralf is any good, he certainly hasn't been great at adapting like a Conte surely would have, but we do know Ole is shite.
300+ million spent, not a single trophy (something both of his predecessors managed), constant shitty points hauls in the 70's and left a squad in absolute free-fall that lost 9 of his final 22 games (10 if we include the EL final), stretched over two seasons.
 
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over his hundred or so games before this season he was better than ralf has been. everyone agreed he also dramatically improved the squad (until they needed an excuse for ralf this season). the team he inherited had lingard, martial and andreas as important players. now its bruno and sancho in those positions. neither manager has won anything, but we look further with ralf vs oles 2/3 place and litany of semis and finals

You don't get my point. Ole collapsed completely with a team he built. Ralf is doing badly with a team that is 100% inherited.

The team Ole inherited won the League Cup, Europa League, finished runner up in the league and runner up in the FA cup, in what way did he take us forward from that?

That everyone agreed that Ole improved the team dramatically is also completely made up. Both on here and fans and in real life argued constantly about this.

Ole improved this team so much that 90% would agree that this group of players won't ever win anything and that we most likely need a complete overhaul to go forward from here.
 
Ole didn't just leave behind a shit squad, he left behind a culture of laziness and entitlement that has basically created an impossible job for Rangnick and an incredibly difficult job ahead for Ten Hag also.